Interview with Jurgen Appelo

Today I bring you conversation with Jurgen Appelo who calls himself a creative networker. He is a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader and freethinker. As per Inc.com he comes among Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Great Leadership Speaker. I can’t miss to mention that he is the author of the book Management 3.0, which describes the role of the manager in Agile organizations. Isn’t it amazing? One guy with so many achievements in a very short while.

When I got an opportunity to interview Jurgen, I learnt about who inspires him and how he thought of bringing Management 3.0 to the world and here is what Jurgen has to share;

Q1 Who is Jurgen Appelo in his personal life?

Jurgen: In my private life, I am still Jurgen Appelo. 🙂 I love reading. I like running. I live in Brussels with my partner Raoul. And we both have ridiculously busy jobs, which means that we often both work while we relax at home.

Q2. What was your biggest achievement as a kid?

Jurgen: I designed a wedding card when I was 4 years old, which was then used by my Kindergarten teacher when she married. I designed the backgrounds of a school play. And I wrote several scripts for comical sketches. And when I had a Commodore 64 computer, I was quite proud when I hacked it to enable multi-tasking.

Q3. Who is your inspiration?

Jurgen: There are thousands of inspiring people. I don’t focus on one person. Some (random) names that come to mind are Richard Dawkins, Richard Branson, and Jennifer Saunders. It’s more the things that people do that I find inspiring than the people themselves.

Q4. What made you think of Management 3.0 and presenting it to the world?

Jurgen: I started blogging on NOOP.NL (my personal blog) when I was still a manager at a medium-sized company in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. And I wrote about my experiences as a manager when I was introducing agile practices in the company. It appeared that people liked those articles, so that gave me the idea to write a book about it. At that time, the term “web 3.0” started being used, so I called it “management 3.0”. Afterward, other people started using terms such as “marketing 3.0”, “loyalty 3.0”, etc.

Q5. Mention three simple things that can make a workplace happier.

Jurgen:

Be appreciative toward people by recognizing them for good work.

Give them the freedom to organize their own work and let them self-organize in the way they think is best.

And offer them a purpose, a reason why they’re in it together and a belief that they can make an impact in the world.

Q6. Final words for our readers…

Don’t be afraid to run experiments. Try new things all the time and learn faster than anybody else. That will get you anywhere you want!

Jurgen Appelo is pioneering management to help creative organizations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He offers concrete games, tools, and practices, so you can introduce better management, with fewer managers.

Jurgen can help you upgrade your enterprise with more engagement and faster results; He can show you how to become an agile business with better software; He shows you how to creatively manage your company; And he can inspire professionals with a purpose, advocating work-life integration for creative people.Jurgen calls himself a creative networker.Jurgen is CEO of the business network Happy Melly, and co-founder of the Agile Lean Europe network and the Stoos Network.